Crux

3 DOMESTIC BLISS

Early October

Sam straightened her back, spade in hand. Sweat ran freely down her face, uncaught by the bandana across her brow, and dripped into the CO2-filtering respirator she wore over mouth and nose. Her tank top was plastered to her skin by perspiration. It felt glorious. The plastic panels of the greenhouse trapped the sun’s warmth and held it in. The solar-powered CO2 pumps captured carbon dioxide from the outside air and concentrated it inside, where the plants breathed it in, and grew.

She was harvesting gene-hacked Aloe arborescens today, heavily engineered to grow fast in this high-CO2 atmosphere, its thick succulent leaves loaded with bio-engineered antibiotics and wound healing factors. A plant they could sell at market to bring in funds for the orphanage. Sam looked around the greenhouse, looked at the dozens of other plants, little chemical factories, all growing something they could sell.

Every one of these plants would be illegal in Europe, she thought. Most of them illegal back in the US.

How strange to live in a place where this technology was so normal, so essential, even. Rich countries had the luxury to ban biotechnologies. Poor countries depended on them.

Sam caught the train of her thoughts and laughed into her respirator.

Me, a gardener. Who would’ve thought?

It was absurd. She’d come to the polar opposite life of her eight years as a spy and a soldier.

What would Nakamura think, Sam wondered, if he could see me now?

Her smile disappeared for a moment. Her mentor was a long way from here. Did he think she was a traitor? Did she?

Change happens, Nakamura had told her once. You have to be adaptable to survive.

Adaptable, Sam mused. She’d go with that.

Then she felt the minds of the children, and her worries dissipated as a smile came back to her face. She finished her task, cycled through the flimsy plastic airlock, and came outside as Kit and Sarai rounded the small copse of trees and ran at her, hand in hand, laughing in the bright sunshine.

Seven year-old Kit jumped into her arms, his mind a gem more glorious than the sun, and she twirled him around, as twelve year-old Sarai laughed and smiled, her eyes and mind twinkling.

Behind them, more slowly, came old Khun Mae, a frown on her face, no sense of a mind there, the head caretaker casting her disapproving gaze over Sam, in her Western garb with her shoulders uncovered, and her carefree embrace of the drug that connected her to these children.

Sam ignored it, and spun and spun and spun little Kit, feeling the endless whirling emanating from his mind, the wonder of it, the limitless joy of youth, of life with these children.

There were nine children here, and three caretakers, and Jake. Eight of the children, ranging in age from one to eight years old, had been exposed to Nexus in the womb, most of them repeatedly. Once a mother felt her unborn child’s mind through Nexus, most felt a strong draw to take Nexus again, to touch the half-formed thoughts of the little being growing inside themselves once more.

The children were enchanting, vexing, confounding. Most of them were scarred in some way. They acted out at times, testing her, bickering with each other, being petulant or disobedient or just stubborn. But they were also radiant at a level that shone right through their scars and the trouble they caused. Their use of Nexus was instinctive, fluent in a way that Sam would never be. They communicated with each other more in thoughts than words, in blurs of impressions and ideas often too fast for her to follow. And she could hide nothing from them. They knew her inside and out. The touch of their minds made her spirit soar. She couldn’t get enough of them.

The ninth child, Sarai, was different. Twelve years old, she’d been four when she’d drunk one of the vials she’d seen her mother drink with one of the “uncles” who paraded through their lives. The drug had lodged in her brain just as surely as if she’d been exposed to it in the womb.

Sarai had had a hard life, her home a never-ending stream of men who paid to take her mother in body and mind, their brains flushed with Nexus as they fucked, or worse. More than once she’d lain in her bed, terrified as she felt men hurt her mother, use her cruelly with their minds connected so they could feel her pain and degradation.

She’d learned to shut it out. Mostly.

Sarai was nine when she first slipped, and a john noticed her mind, and wanted her too. Her mother had thrown the man out, yelling and screaming until neighbors had come to the door and he’d left. And the next day, Sarai’s mother took her to temple, and begged the monks for help for her special daughter. Four months later, the nine year-old Sarai had arrived here, the safe and loving home she’d never had before. She was more fluent with Nexus than Sam would ever be, but less so than the children who’d gestated with it. A bridge between generations.

And now Sarai was on the verge of becoming a young woman. She was the same age that Sam’s sister had been, when… when everything had gone to hell at Yucca Grove.

Sam loved Sarai most of all.

Sam met the youngest of the children on her first night. Jake’s pleading and the enthusiasm of the older kids had persuaded old Khun Mae, reluctantly, to let Sam stay for a day or two. A day or two that became months.

She woke that first night to the sound of a baby crying, inconsolably. Ten minutes. Twenty. Forty. An hour. Finally she roused herself and crept down the hall towards the sound. The room was half lit, but she had no trouble seeing. Khun Mae was there, stern-faced. And Jake, holding little Aroon, the one year-old, and bouncing on his feet, up and down, trying to soothe him. Sarai was next to them, shushing Aroon. Aroon’s tiny mind wailed in chaos, louder than his lungs. Jake and Sarai’s minds were consternated, trying to exude some sort of peace and tranquility for the infant, but also giving off fatigue, tension, a quiet despair that Aroon would never fall back asleep.

Sam stepped into the room, softly, slowly, singing a lullaby her mother had sung to her, letting it come out of her mind as well as her voice. They all turned to look. Khun Mae, Sarai, Jake, and even little Aroon.

He cried, and she came closer, and he looked into her eyes, and held out his arms, and reached out with his tiny, magical mind. She took him from Jake, and his urgent cries turned to tired cries, then to sobs, and eventually to sleep. From that day on, all Sam had to do was hold him, and sing to him in her mind, or meditate with him, and little Aroon would quiet, and calm, and find his way back to sleep if it was bedtime. In his happy awake moments, his mind was the most wonderfully unique of any of them, all bright colors and moving shapes and form without meaning. The universe shimmered when she saw it through his eyes.

Zen mind. Beginner’s mind.

And through her thoughts, perhaps, little Aroon made a bit more sense of the world around him.

“His mother was a heroin addict,” Jake told her in the kitchen, that first night. “She was shooting up while she was pregnant with him. He doesn’t self-soothe well. Dopamine, serotonin, opioid – all his neurotransmitter systems are screwed up. Most of these kids were born to mothers that used drugs besides Nexus while they were pregnant, but Aroon had it the worst.”

Jake. Dr Jacob Foster, to be precise. He was tall and built like a lumberjack. Boyishly good-looking behind that reddish beard. A child psychologist who’d finished his PhD at U of Chicago, three years ago. He’d been at the home for almost two years when Sam had arrived, on a grant from the Mira Foundation to study these children.

“His mom lives in the village,” Jake went on. “Well, lived there. She gave him up to us when he was born. But then changed her mind a month later. She was a mess. Not fit to take care of him. And he was bonding with the kids here, already. We wouldn’t give him back. And that’s what really heated up all the tension with the villagers.”

“Where’s the mother now?” Sam asked. Her Nexus was back on a short leash, her mind listening but not transmitting.

“Dead. Heroin overdose. Suicide, maybe. Her family said we killed her with black magic. Not good.”

Jake was gentle and kind to the children. He laughed a lot, even as he studied them. He taught them as much as he observed them. His mind gave off a sense of earnestness. His affection for the kids was as clear in his thoughts as it was in his words and deeds. He was curious about “Sunee Martin”, attracted to her, but respectful of the way she raised her mental guard around him, the way she shared everything with the children but almost nothing with the one adult nearby who also had Nexus 5.

She took him to bed a month after she arrived. He was handsome and smart and funny, but it was his basic goodness that won her over. The gentle way he took a splinter out of Sarai’s finger, the love in his voice and mind when he talked about his parents and little brother, his guileless enthusiasm for making the world a better place, his hope to have kids of his own one day.

She explained her rules to him. Sex would happen when she initiated. She would always be on top. And it would be just sex, nothing more.

He complied, mostly. And it was sweet and hot and uncomplicated. She loved the touch of his hands on her skin, the feel of his body beneath her, the passion and pleasure that rose from his mind, the satiated feeling they shared after. She started to look forward to her nights, almost as much as she looked forward to the daytimes playing with and tutoring the children.